The Golden Mean (7 page)

“Green right here.” She touched her cheek.

I was more curious than tender, though, and it was not long before I was back to carrying my father’s kit for him.

Despite his disapproval, small animals were not safe from me. I had already dissected numerous crustaceans, fish, mice, and once a dog I found lying dead on the beach. I hid my drawings, wrapped in an oilcloth, in a hole under a rock above the high-water line. The dog had been the best: there had been food in the gut still and shit in the bowels. I burnt the carcass when I was done so no one would find it mutilated and know it had been me.

The last surgery my father performed before our move to the capital was on a man who suffered headaches and seizures preceded by intensely heightened vision. At the highest pitch of the sickness he would fall to the floor, kick his legs, flail his hands, clench his teeth, and foam at the mouth. Afterwards he would have no memory of the attack. His family had tried the conventional treatments: ritual purifications, chants invoking the gods, charms thrown into the sea, no baths, no wearing black or goatskins, no highly flavoured foods, and no putting one hand or foot on top of the other.

“Bullshit,” my father said. “They want to avoid the only true cure. Not that I blame them, but I ask you.” He slapped one hand on top of the other to demonstrate the forbidden position. “Absolute bullshit. There’s a woman behind it, you wait and see.”

“What is the cure?” I asked.

“Mucus,” my father said. “In you and me, it flows naturally down from the brain and is dispersed throughout the body. In men like this, though, the normal passages are blocked and it enters the blood vessels, where it prevents the flow of air to the brain. And it is cold, you see, and the sudden cooling of the blood vessels brings on the attack. If there is too much mucus, the blood will congeal and he will die. Or if it enters one vessel but not another, one part of the body may be permanently damaged. The patient will suffer worse in the winter, when there is cold outside as well as in. The winds, too, must be taken into account. The north wind is the healthiest because it separates out the moisture from the air. The south wind is the worst. It dims the moon and the stars, and darkens wine, and brings damp. No wind today, so that is not a factor.”

I knew he was rehearsing what he had read the night before, reminding himself as much as teaching me. The sacred disease, it was called, though my father agreed with the author of the treatise that the gods were no more responsible for this than for a runny nose. Bad healers claimed so only to excuse their own incompetence, or inability to effect a cure. It was, my father acknowledged, one of the most difficult diseases to treat.

“What is the cure?” I asked again.

“The mucus must be released.”

At the house we were met by the man’s brother. “Will he suffer?”

“He is already suffering,” my father said.

In the man’s bedroom he laid out his instruments. These were three stone tools I had never seen before, not part of his regular kit.

“I know,” he said, reading my thoughts. “But they’re too heavy to carry around every day, and you never do this without preparing for it first.”

“You will release the demon,” the man said from his bed, with relish. He looked like his brother, a big barrel of a man with a shaved head and a genial face that was probably good, in happier times, for amusing children. They shared a sympathetic, humorous look, more pronounced in the sick man, who also slurred his words slightly. Damage from the seizures, I guessed, but my father knew better.

“I hope there will be a release.” For all his impatience and sternness, my father was careful never to contradict a patient or do anything to disturb him unduly. “Will you excuse me?”

In the hall, I heard him ask the brother if the patient had been drinking.

“Not at all!” the big man said.

“I smell it on his breath,” my father said. “I gave you specific instructions.”

“For the pain.” I could tell the man was crying.

My father told him to wait downstairs.

Back in the room, he pulled from the large bag that he had carried himself something that looked like a vise.

“Oh dear,” the sick man said.

With the help of a slave, my father positioned the sick man’s head in the grip and tightened it very slowly. “Shake your head,” he kept telling the man, and when he could no longer do so, my father was satisfied.

“It’s tight,” the man said.

My father placed a leather bit in the man’s mouth and told him to keep it there. He took the knife I held out to him and made a quick X on the man’s shaven scalp. The man screamed. My father took one of the stone tools, a bore, and placed its tip in the centre of the X, where he had peeled back the flaps of skin.

“No, no, no!” the man screamed.

My father pointed to the floor, and I retrieved the bit and put it back in the man’s mouth. He gnawed fiercely at it, snorting through his nose, his eyes rolling in his head.

It took long, longer than I want to remember, even now. My father had time to tell me the name of the tool, a trepan, and to praise the antiquity of the procedure, practised even by the ancients. The blood was profuse, as with all scalp lacerations, and the man shat himself more than once.

“You must tell me if you feel the sickness coming on,” my father told him, but the man was past talking at that point.

I knew my father hoped to release the mucus in a dramatic stream, but by the time he withdrew the button of bone it was clear that would not happen. We both peered hopefully into the little black cavity, though my father was unwilling to bring a candle near so we might see better, and risk heating the brain. Heating and cooling in rapid succession were known to bring on the seizures, he explained. He seemed uncertain for a moment, still expecting that sudden gush, but then roused himself and pointed hopefully to the glossy quantity that had flowed from the man’s nose during the procedure. He instructed the slave who had sat on the man’s legs on the dressing of the wound, retrieved the bit, and patted the man’s shoulder affectionately before leaving the room.

Downstairs we found the brother passed out on the kitchen table, a wine cup by his head. A woman stood nearby, her arms crossed over her chest. Her hair was hennaed orange and she wore a fine linen dress and a lot of jewellery. Her eyes were hard.

“We are finished,” my father said, unnecessarily.

“Did you see the demon?” I guessed she was the well brother’s wife.

“We did not,” my father said.

She gave him a small, clinking pouch: his payment.

“Come,” he said to me. He had found his woman.

“He won’t have died on my watch, anyway,” she said, seeing his dislike of her and needing to swat him back.

My father didn’t answer her or look back, but put his arm around my shoulders and walked me out of the house. The sick man was still alive when we left the next morning.

W
E ARRIVED
IN THE CITY
on a late-summer afternoon three days later, the air swimming with heat and, we would learn, fever. My mother and Arimneste drew veils across their noses and mouths against the stench. My mother closed her eyes; Arimneste kept hers open. Arimnestus refused to sit with the women and rode with my father and me, annoying us with his constant burping. He was practising.

The streets were empty; no one came out to see us rattling down the cobblestones in our few carts piled high with the stuff of home. I had never seen a settlement bigger than a village, let alone a city, let alone a royal capital, and felt like a country rube with my eyes popping out and my jaw hanging down. There were animals lying in the streets, rats mostly and some mangy dogs. I hopped off the cart to look closer.

“Plague,” my father said, looking up from his book. I knew I had expressed an interest of which he approved. He caught my eye and I saw the encouragement there—
look, look, tell me what you see
. I picked up a rat by the tail and the flesh streamed from it, running with maggots. It had gone soft as a bad fruit on the side it lies on. I gave it a shake just to see the body drip from the little cage of rib bones.

“Would you think that could happen to a man?” my father asked.

I smiled despite myself, a smile he extraordinarily returned. We both shook our heads. The wonder of it!

Our house turned out to be smaller than our home in Stageira, and poshly appointed. My father had bought it from the son of a government official who had recently died in the epidemic. I wondered in which room his body had dripped from his bones when they lifted him onto the plank to carry him out. My mother, grim-faced, withdrew with her women to the kitchen and emerged ten minutes later, smiling. Quality pots, she informed us. My father took the largest room for his dispensary and study and allotted the twins and their nurse a pair of sunny rooms overlooking the flower garden, me an alcove off the kitchen. He said I would thank him in winter for letting me sleep so close to the hearth. My mother gave me a look to say we would find a place for my things and probably rig up a curtain for privacy; a lot for one look, but we had spent many years more or less alone together and often understood each other quicker than words. I was too excited about the prospect of exploring the city to be disappointed with the sleeping arrangements. For supper that evening we ate the last of our travelling food, dried this and that. The women would go to the market in the morning.

I announced my intention to spend the day alone, walking. My father corrected me.

“You boys will attend the king with me,” he said. “We’re expected.”

“But,” I said.

My father looked at me, full of sadness, took my plate, and sent me to my alcove, where I lay listening to the bustle of unpacking that lasted well into the night. I heard my father’s querulous voice submitting to my mother’s arrangements, and luxuriated in hating him for a few hours. My mother had that effect on him, rendering him feckless and feeble and needing to be led. His hands seemed to go slack from the wrists in her presence, so that he couldn’t even lift a book unless she’d brought it to him first. If she asked him for something, he would go stupid. Is this soap? he would say, bringing a vial of oil, and couldn’t suppress an animal grunt of pleasure when she brought the correct object herself. The twins and I agreed this behaviour was supremely irritating and ourselves relied on our mother for as little as possible, seizing our independence early. Poor woman. She was harmless, though fiercely organized, clean and tidy, and loved her little queendom. She wanted us all to be helpless without her, which only our father offered. We children preferred to be cruel.

The next morning I woke early. I lay in my alcove for a while listening to the street-vendors who’d seen our newly arrived carts and paused just outside our gate—
fresh bread, goat’s milk, best milk
—then got up. My mother’s bronze, not yet hung in her room, leaned against a wall amidst the jumble of furniture and unpacked crates. Unused to seeing myself, I stopped to strike a few poses: one foot forward, hand on hip, chin high, higher. Was this a sophisticated city boy? Maybe this?

My father’s shove propelled me into an iron sconce. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me.

At breakfast my mother took one look at me and gasped. The bleeding had stopped, but the eye was puffy and already bluing.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “I tripped.”

“Come, boys.” My father pushed his breakfast plate away.

He hadn’t eaten; neither had I. From the way he had stared at his food without touching it, I knew he hadn’t meant to hurt me.

“Kiss your mother.”

“And me,” Arimneste said. When I leaned close to her she whispered, “Take me out later. Mother will let me go, with you.”

I didn’t answer.

Arimnestus immediately ran ahead of us, happy and excited, sniffing at everything like a little hunting dog.

“Nervous,” my father said to me, just the one word during our walk up to the palace. A statement, a question, an apology.

I took his arm to steady myself as I searched for a nonexistent stone in my sandal. He looked at my foot, then discreetly away as I fingered out the little fiction.

The king, Amyntas, smiled when he saw my father. It was like seeing a piece of granite smile. I saw that this particular movement of the face hurt him, saw the flare of pain in his eyes. I saw that almost every movement he made hurt him. He had been wounded all over his body at various times, and was suffering constantly now. My father knelt and began to unpack his kit.

“And these are your sons,” Amyntas said.

“My sons,” my father confirmed.

“Trained, yes?” Amyntas said. “They’ll fight?”

My father sent us then to play with the pages.

Arimnestus ran off immediately with a few boys his own age as though he had known them all his life. That was his gift.

“Where’d you get that?” the older ones wanted to know, of my black eye.

“Fight,” I said.

Raised eyebrows, half-smiles.

“Leave him alone,” a voice called. “My father likes his father.”

Philip was less than a year younger than me, short, strong, with a high colour and clear, open eyes. The pages separated to let him through. He reached up and flicked me companionably across the eyebrow with his finger. “Hurt?”

It occurs to me now that I had the one eye then and he the two; a joke across the years. I want to have flicked him back or hit him or said something withering, but I just stood there, eye watering like a mouth until I couldn’t see from it but could feel tears running down the one cheek. He laughed happily and invited me to the gymnasium with his companions.

“My father told me to wait here,” I said.

What a lot I am claiming for the eyes—my mother’s eyes, my father’s, and now his—but I swear he looked at me as much as to say that he too had such a father, and understood, and would help me. He flicked me again, roughly in the same place, with his knuckles this time, enough to open the wound there and start it bleeding again.

“Come on,” he said when I hesitated. “Come on. Have to clean that up.”